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Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jan 15, 2008

Whatever happened to Yamagishi?

Hideyuki Ikuhara's main responsibility at Yamagishi is feeding the pigs. It's a full-time job, but he expects no salary for his efforts. In fact, he quit his work developing high-tech televisions and gave up all his possessions for this lifestyle — and he couldn't be happier.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Aug 14, 2007

Abuse, racism, lost evidence deny justice in Valentine case

In 1999, a Brazilian resident of Japan named Milton Higaki was involved in an accident that killed a schoolgirl. Rather than face justice in Japan, he fled to Brazil fearing "discrimination as a foreigner in Japanese courts."
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 19, 2007

Palestinians still paying for past failures

PRAGUE — Every week, it seems, brings another backward step for Palestine. President Mahmoud Abbas' failure to convene the Palestinian Legislative Assembly, due to a Hamas boycott, may lead inexorably to the final breakdown of the political structures created under the Oslo Accords.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 19, 2007

Palestinians need more than unity to heal

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- The reconciliation between the leaders of the two major Palestinian groups, Hamas and Fatah, that has just been negotiated in Saudi Arabia is being hailed as a major political breakthrough. But the national unity government created as a result of this agreement faces many daunting...
COMMENTARY
Feb 8, 2007

Asia's transformation and the future of Japanese diplomacy

Prior to World War II, Japan's position in the international community was dependent on its power and status in Asia. From the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, it was essential for Japan to have considerable stature within Asia so that the country could associate on equal terms with Western nations...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Sep 23, 2006

Sports festivals: menace to health?

It's autumn in Japan, and you know what that means -- sports festivals! Oct. 10 is Sports Day, a national holiday started in 1964 to mark the opening day of the Tokyo Olympics. Since then, autumn has been a time of year for schools and communities to hold annual sports festivals.
EDITORIALS
Nov 7, 2005

Draft revision tosses principles aside

The Liberal Democratic Party, which has long claimed that the present pacifist Constitution was imposed on the Japanese people by the Occupation Forces, has announced a draft revision. Although the text begins promisingly enough with "The Japanese people, based on their own will and determination, establish...
COMMENTARY / World
May 28, 2005

Jakarta and Beijing cozy up

SINGAPORE -- During Chinese President Hu Jintao's recent visit to Jakarta and Bandung for the Golden Jubilee Commemoration of the 1955 Bandung Conference, Indonesian organizers underscored China's place at the conference and Hu stayed an extra day to sign a Strategic Partnership Agreement between Indonesia...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 18, 2003

Town hopes wind bells ring in some new vitality

The tinkling of some 3,000 glass wind bells in a small mountain town in Aichi Prefecture is not just a sign of summer but a sound of hope for community revitalization.
JAPAN / KANSAI BEAT
Feb 7, 2003

Osaka survey follows ethnic lines

OSAKA -- While Osaka's foreign residents are divided on the need to provide information for medical services in foreign languages, they are in general agreement that schools should teach more about the history, language and culture of other countries.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 2, 2003

Asian bridges via Okinawa

SINGAPORE -- Earlier this month a closed-door workshop and open public symposium focused on bridging the divisions within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and those between Japan and Okinawa as well as on strengthening the ASEAN-Japan partnership through governance, human security and community-building....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 8, 2003

Music of the saints

Someone once said that the best way to start building a jazz collection would be to buy a couple albums from each decade that Miles Davis was recording and, after that, choose a sideman from each of these selections and buy one of his solo albums. The same could be said of John Zorn and his collaborators,...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 5, 2003

Time for a U.N. response

HONOLULU -- North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship is escalating. Pyongyang is now claiming that only a nonaggression treaty between North Korea and Washington can prevent "a catastrophic crisis of a war" on the Korean Peninsula.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle / JET STREAM
Nov 15, 2002

Perfectly at home with the local culture

Fame comes easy to Doug Brittain, a four-year resident of Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture. Last August, the 28-year-old assistant language teacher became the grand champion in the island's annual Akadomari Sumo tournament.
COMMENTARY
Oct 7, 2002

Seize the chance for peace

At their historic Pyongyang summit Sept. 17, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il opened a new chapter in the history of Northeast Asia by agreeing to resume bilateral talks on diplomatic normalization this month. The agreement was announced in the Pyongyang declaration...
JAPAN
Aug 21, 2002

Jam-packed house rows traded for condos

The Harue district of Edogawa Ward, Tokyo, was once crammed with run-down houses on small plots separated only by narrow alleyways.
JAPAN
Aug 10, 2002

Communities are offered cash to reduce pollution

The Environment Ministry plans to tackle global warming by paying community groups for their reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, ministry officials said Friday.
Japan Times
JAPAN
May 23, 2002

Quake survivor, 61, now golf pro

KOBE -- The 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake took the lives of more than 6,400 people and left tens of thousands homeless, but it helped turn one middle-aged man who lost most of his worldly possessions into a professional golfer.
Events
Feb 19, 2002

Hard times spark rare, fiery debate at annual Kansai Economic Summit

OSAKA -- For the past four decades, the Kansai region's business leaders have gathered annually in February to discuss a variety of local economic issues.
JAPAN
Sep 28, 2001

Full text of Koizumi's policy speech to Diet

Following is a provisional translation of the policy speech delivered by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to an extraordinary Diet session that opened Thursday for a 72-day session.
COMMENTARY
Jul 5, 2001

It's all too lonely at the top

LONDON -- As predicted, the Labour Party won the June general election, giving Tony Blair a second term as prime minister. This is bad news for the media monster which, as we all know, has a voracious appetite but nonetheless a fastidious and restricted diet: sleaze, scandal, violence, betrayal. A large...
JAPAN
May 8, 2001

Prime minister's policy speech

The following is a provisional translation of the policy speech given Monday by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to the 151st session of the Diet:
COMMUNITY
Feb 11, 2001

The accidental ambassadors

Less than six months after bathing in the international attention that came with hosting the Olympic Games, Australians are celebrating their nation's 100th birthday.
JAPAN
Dec 23, 2000

Education Law in need of drastic review: report

The 53-year-old Fundamental Law of Education should be reviewed to determine if it meets current needs and lends itself to the formation of an educational system appropriate for the 21st century, an advisory panel to Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori said in its final report released Friday.
JAPAN
Sep 24, 2000

Dead pets returning to haunt the neighbors

ICHIHARA, Chiba Pref. -- It was the start of a real-life horror story for the people of Ichihara's Otsubo district when a smokestack suddenly appeared in a neighbor's yard in August last year.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 8, 2000

Think global, act local; or is it think local, act global?

LANDSCAPES AND COMMUNITIES ON THE PACIFIC RIM: From Asia to the Pacific Northwest, edited by Karen K. Gaul and Jackie Hiltz. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2000, 254 pp., $24.95 (paper). Lives are complex, and if this era of globalization has taught us anything, it is that this complexity extends beyond local...
JAPAN
Jan 3, 2000

Another Century: Slump, aging Japan skew debate on foreigners

Staff writer One sector of Japan's immigrant community comes into view every Friday at around noon, when people wearing white caps walk into a single story prefabricated building in the city of Isesaki, Gunma Prefecture. This is Isesaki Jame-e Mosque -- a sanctuary since 1995 for about 500 Muslims living...
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 6, 1999

The world as policeman

LONDON -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has rightly drawn attention to the "need for timely intervention by the international community when death and suffering are being inflicted on large numbers of people, and when the state nominally in charge is unable or unwilling to stop it." He has pointed...
JAPAN
May 13, 1999

U.N. police call 'koban' model key for strife-hit communities

Staff writer

Longform

Visitors walk past Sou Fujimoto's Grand Ring, which has been recognized as the largest wooden structure in the world.
Can a World Expo still matter? Japan is about to find out.